How codedcode Was Converted To XHTML
codedcode was converted from HTML to XHTML the weekend of 18.
and 19. December 1999, by Hege Refsnes and Ståle Refsnes.
To convert a Web site from HTML to XHTML, you should be
familiar with the XHTML syntax rules of the previous chapters.
The following steps were executed (in the order listed below):
A DOCTYPE Definition Was Added
The following DOCTYPE declaration was added as the first line
of every page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
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Note that we used the transitional DTD. We could have chosen
the strict DTD, but found it a little too "strict", and a little
too hard to conform to.
A Note About The DOCTYPE
Your pages must have a DOCTYPE declaration if you want them
to validate as correct XHTML.
Be aware however, that newer browsers (like Internet Explorer
6) might treat your document differently depending on the
<!DOCTYPE> declaration. If the browser reads a document with a
DOCTYPE, it might treat the document as "correct". Malformed
XHTML might fall over and display differently than without a
DOCTYPE.
Lower Case Tag And Attribute Names
Since XHTML is case sensitive, and since XHTML only accepts
lower case HTML tags and attribute names, a general search and
replace function was executed to replace all upper case tags
with lowercase tags. The same was done for attribute names. We
have always tried to use lower case names in our Web, so the
replace function did not produce many real substitutions.
All Attributes Were Quoted
Since the W3C XHTML 1.0 Recommendation states that all
attribute values must be quoted, every page in the web was
checked to see that attributes values were properly quoted. This
was a time-consuming job, and we will surely never again forget
to put quotes around our attribute values.
Empty Tags: <hr> , <br> and <img>
Empty tags are not allowed in XHTML. The <hr> and <br> tags
should be replaced with <hr /> and <br />.
This produced a problem with Netscape that misinterpreted the
<br/> tag. We don't know why, but changing it to <br /> worked
fine. After that discovery, a general search and replace
function was executed to swap the tags.
A few other tags (like the <img> tag) were suffering from the
same problem as above. We decided not to close the <img> tags
with </img>, but with /> at the end of the tag. This was done
manually.
The Web Site Was Validated
After that, all pages were validated against the official W3C
DTD with this link:
XHTML Validator. A few more errors were found and edited
manually. The most common error was missing </li> tags in lists.
Should we have used a converting tool? Well, we could have
used TIDY.
Dave Raggett's HTML TIDY is a free utility for cleaning up
HTML code. It also works great on the hard-to-read markup
generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools, and
it can help you identify where you need to pay further attention
on making your pages more accessible to people with
disabilities.
The reason why we didn't use Tidy? We knew about XHTML when
we started writing this web site. We knew that we had to use
lowercase tag names and that we had to quote our attributes. So
when the time came (to do the conversion), we simply had to test
our pages against the W3C XHTML validator and correct the few
mistakes. AND - we have learned a lot about writing "tidy" HTML
code. |
